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a sad toy to sit on the shelf

My daughter has been into playdoh since she was very little. It's one thing having pots with cutters and rolling pins to play with, but another altogether when she was given a set for Christmas. The Coco Nutty Monkey set from Hasbro contains a large, bright plastic monkey and five small pots of different coloured dough.First impressions for all of us were good; this looked like it was going to be fun to play with. The monkey's tail looked like it would go up and down which meant playdoh could be squeezed through a gap somewhere. I was taken straight back to my childhood with memories of the hairdressing playdoh set that I had.

The monkey is easy to set up, requiring nothing technical to make it work. The monkey's head needs to be placed in his neck and the body attaches together the first time you take it out of the box. My daughter was fascinated with the tail that you wiggled. When doing this it made the monkey's arms move together and apart. Ah so we could put some playdoh in the various shapes that were in fact disguised as half coconuts, and place them on the monkey's hands to create shapes.As we tried this the first time, we realised that unless we jammed a lump of playdoh into the coconut shell, then it would just fall out and we wouldn't get a shape at all. Too much playdoh and the shells don't meet; therefore no shape can be made.This area of the monkey was very difficult to get to work. Never mind we would use his head next. There were shape holes in the head which meant that we could play hairdressers as well, just on a monkey.

That was a great plan until we realised all you could actually do was place a lump of playdoh in the hollow part of his head, press down on his head, and get the playdoh stuck in his head compartment, with a small amount being squeezed out of the holes. There is no way a young child would have been strong enough to do this, and the toy isn't marketed at, nor wanted by an adult.So we had two parts of the monkey that wasn't really providing us with anything useful. He was a cute little monkey to look at, and there were plenty of shape areas in the grass area that the monkey was sitting on to be able to press playdoh into and remove for shapes, but this really wasn't worth the £14.99 it's being marketed for.

Sadly there is no playability attached to this playdoh set. It sits on the shelf looking at my daughter when she plays with her playdoh now rather than being invited out to play. He is a sturdy piece of plastic, so we can't fault this area, just not really sure what the designers were thinking when he was produced.I really do wish we had saved our money and bought a different playdoh toy for Christmas instead.